New ‘Fast and Furious 7’ Video Reveals How They Pulled Off That Insane Plane Stunt

The stunts in the Fast and Furious franchise have grown increasingly ridiculous over the years, with the heroes (and their cars) defying the laws of physics at every turn. While it’s obvious that the more ludicrous action scenes are created with the help of CGI, a new behind-the-scenes featurette has revealed that one of the most insane scenes from the Fast and Furious 7 trailer is real. Yes, they really did drop a fleet of parachute-equipped muscle cars out of an airplane.

It’s a sequence that gets teased in every Fast and Furious 7 trailer: Dom, Bryan and the rest of the gang arrive at their latest endeavor by driving their cars off a C-130 cargo plane, deploying parachutes, and landing on the road, ready to drive. It’s a sequence of glorious implausibility, which makes the fact that large pieces of it are practical all the more exciting. The stunt coordinators in the featurette don’t dwell on the serious headache of chartering a plane and acquiring cars that they don’t mind dropping a few thousand feet, but they do dwell on the actual feat of driving vehicles out that plane while cameramen in wingsuits follow them on their 130 mile per hour journey towards the surface of the Earth.

If they gave out an Oscar for stunt coordination, Furious 7 would be a prestige film. This is the kind of sequence that could have been created entirely within a computer, so seeing director James Wan and his fearless stunt guys go the extra mile should bring a smile to the face of any old school action movie fan. This cannot be said enough: they actually dropped cars out of an airplane and then jumped after them with cameras. Somewhere, Hal Needham is smiling.